Comment by __MatrixMan__
20 hours ago
How would you enforce that? Who can be trusted with the ability to classify things as advertising and in so doing silence their critics?
The solution is explicit trust. Not fingerprints for users, but digital signatures for content. If it's not signed by somebody the user trusts, don't render it.
The user is the only one who can be approach that task without a conflict of interest. If somebody wants the user to run code that phones home about user behavior, make them gain the user's trust.
Many countries ban cigarette advertising. Not saying its perfect but has helped reduce smoking.
That works if your ads have a physical location in space, like a billboard or a radio station, so that you have a place to go when you decide it's time to shut them down. You can't even get a stable URL for a web ad. Where are the cops gonna go? How many different "not my problem try this guy" hops are they gonna have to traverse before they find somebody who actually did the bad thing, how many different countries will they have to visit while they do so?
It only works if you re-architect the web into something that's even more censorship friendly than it currently is. I hate ads too, but the medicine seems worse than the disease in this case.
This is silly, you are dismissing a solution which improves a problem in a positive way.
Hospitals are not perfect, people die, with your l;ogic we should close down them all.
Doing nothing and keeping advertising keeps a negative situation alive.